Old McDonald Had a Farm...

21 March 2012

I could write a whole series of blog posts devoted to a review/criticism of the English books that our school uses. All in all, it's not a bad book. There are parts of the book where I can see that they are attempting to incorporate "best practices" for language instruction. However, I have some issues with the book--starting with its songs.

Each chapter in our English book has a song for the children to learn--which is great in theory. Children learn A LOT from songs. There is a reason why so many of the things that we learn when we are young are put to song--like the ABCs, the Clean-up Song, the 50 States, etc.

However, the songs in our books are some of the weirdest songs I think I've ever heard. The writers try to find a way to put every single vocabulary word and grammatical point into a short song. Consequently, we get songs about pulling off granddad's shoe and what school supplies you have on your desk.

Don't get me wrong. There are a couple songs that are kind of cute--like the following song we sang with 2nd grade.


"I like you.
Hello. Hi.
I've got black hair and brown eyes.


I like you.
Hello. Hi.
I've got blond hair and blue eyes.


I like you.
You like me.
With my friends,
I'm happy." 

Once you've sang this song about 20 times, you start to think it's okay. Clearly, it's supposed to be teaching acceptance of difference--which is great for elementary school children. However, it also seems a little random--in the sense that the chapter is about the parts of the face so the writers had to figure out some way to write about hair/eye color.

The older the kids get the weirder the songs are. I'll have to find a copy of a 6th grade song to share one day.

I've been trying to teach the kids some of the songs that I sang as a kid. This week, with 1st grade, we've been learning about pets--so I thought we could learn "Old McDonald Had a Farm."

We started by practicing our best pet noises--which they were surprisingly reluctant to do. Since we've been practicing gestures with each word, the kids have become more accustomed to making a gesture for whiskers than meow-ing like a cat.

Next, we cut out and colored a picture of Old McDonald and a farm to use in singing the song.

Like any song, at first, they started mumbling along--only clearly getting out "EE II EE II OOOO." Pretty soon, they picked up pretty well and the kids took turns choosing the pet to sing about.